linux.conf.au: Games Linux users play

Some people tend to take a fancy to something or the other after being exposed to the same at an early stage in life. In Tim 'Mithro' Ansell's case, it was exactly the reverse.

A few days short of sixteen years ago, Ansell's parents gave him a PC as a Christmas gift. Just an ex-Telecom AT with half a megabyte of memory and four gigs of storage.

For an eight-year-old, obviously, games were the focus. But in 1991, the situation was the opposite of what it is today: all the cool games were available for the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. There was little or nothing for the PC.

This did not greatly discourage young Ansell. His first experience of Linux was, as for many others, with Red Hat. He heard that Linux would give him the ability to actually write programs. "I ended up installing this thing called Red Hat 5.1 on my computer in a 'massive' 300mb partition."